5/19/2008

Caroline Walker

49 comments:

I saw this image at Monya Rowe's website before it was posted here. I thought: "Pretty." And I think that was about it. It's a nice picture and I'm sure it will hang nicely on someone's wall, but I can't help but think it is too pat somehow.

Just want to get this in before all the unreadable crap I have to scroll past when I check this site every three months now starts showing up..

I like seeing the obvious plainly stated. It relies a good bit on environment, because you automatically think something more must be going on. Who just paints pretty pictures? There must be something else here.. so you look for it.

Hmmmm...I'm not sure who paints just pretty pictures, good point. There IS always something worth globbing on to if you look carefully. My feeling is that this painter's work needs to be looked at in context of her other work (which I haven't seen). Like Karen Kilimnik. If you just saw one of her paintings her work can be grossly misread. Additionally, the regional painters doing this kind of work are "better"? In what way? Technique?These types of "regional" paintings tend to be more sentimental. This painter seems quite aware of her work's sentimentality and using it in service of what the body of work is tying to say. I'd rather see slapdash paintings that bring something new to the table rather than good by-the-book paintings that are predictable.

This is a travel painting. Before you vacate the room you take a shot and when back home in the studio you paint the image. This is painted very confidently, oldish color relations, prob. in there in the photo. Painted quickly, but well, when put in terms of craft, skill, and so on. Maybe someone can post a comment putting it in terms of craft and content, and the various relationships one can have to the other, not always pleasant or expected, but, well...The Painting:Some people feel the need to document their travels like this, so only valid you paint your documentation of your travel room. This is not a sick bed, I guess the title is? Or, I slept here but it wasn't intimate.For me this picture reminds me rummaging around looking for the console where the cord to the table lamp is plugged in. At the same time pulling that little side table up over the bed, pushing the single to the next, still unable to find the console. What the heck.Looks here someone has just sat on the bed.

I'm very open to hearing what people say about any of the paintings. This one bewilders me, but that is not the artist's fault. It's my problem.Though when you people who go after zip hardly even add a comment to the work, it has to make you wonder. Is Karma at work?Say you want to hit the lamppost over there. Well what you do is phone the post and ask if it is ok to hit them. Usually posts like being hit so their response would be 'sure!'. The lamp post hits the attraction button. And you hit yours. You leave the phones running for the duration of the call until impact. Ok!? important.While you don't actually see the lamppost coming towards you it does.You and the lamppost hit! Be open to the fact that the lamppost moved towards you with equal velocity as you moved towards it. And that's Karma. Nothing you can really put a finger on, or should want to figure out!. Karma is not a sensible thing! Simply an arrangement between two or more things that have cell numbers, or an atom share thing.

So great is Sara's sense of superiority over her employees that she refuses to use the servants' back stairs; She breaks off, staring with horror at something descending the stairs. It's Regan on all fours. She's gliding, spiderlike, noiselessly and swiftly, down the staircase. She halts directly at the bottom. Staring at Sharon. Sharon is shocked and eyes fixed on Regan. Regan's tongue begins to flicker rapidly in and out of her mouth.

I really like this painting...I haven't seen any of her other work, which I will now look into, but I enjoy the simplicity and seemingly mundane subject matter..as well as the execution...My intellectual side wants to construct a narrative, but my intuitive side wants to leave it as it is....Overall I think it's intriguing..

Thanks for that person who posted Walker's website. Seeing the rest of the work made me like this painting more. I like how the scenes are somewhat neutral, in that they are depicted between two major events, or just in the dull present. the subjects depicted are lost in thought. Reminds me of Hopper tinged with Sweet Valley High. This neutrality leans towards melancholy for sure but not in a smothering way, though it's dangerously close.

The craft/chops are quite sturdy which binds it to the venerable 'domestic scene' tradition in European painting from the 19th Century and back farther. The narrative here is more loaded with a sense of loss than most of the past antecedents. I like the figureless paintings the most (this might be the only one?). They leave more to the imagination and give back more. It's hard using figures in this way. Any har hars on this?

*Concrete phone: unfair statement regarding my comments about zip. I do comment sparingly but that's because of this guy. MANY people have agreed with me on this, trust me. And besides, if I'm not mistaken you're just one of his cronies that encourages this behavior. (Go on Zip! Allude to this comment with some text culled from an anonymous source. Mode me.)

In telling a story one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately.

Some immediate observations: The 'absence of' rather than presence here haunts me in this piece. I love that the only human interaction appears in a painting within a painting. But those beds (twin) suggest some kind of recent 'presence'. That crooked lamp and it's sinister shadow, spidery on the wall is sublimely painted. There is tension in the way the triangular arrangement of wall painting and furniture mirror the group figures within the painting. This is intriguing me the more I look.....

Juliensky,unfair statement regarding my comments about zip. I do comment sparingly but that's because of this guy.

...not targeted at you or anyone, actually... just an observation.

I'm not going for the lamppost, so Zip doesn't worry me at all. One thing I am going to do is support and enroll him in painting appreciation classes, once a week. I'll be there for the first two weeks to make sure he hasn't snuck off to the computer room. If you call that cronyism then, that'll do!

see that sunlight coming in, it's just before lunch on a day of some clouds. it's time to check out, just one last glance.

personal universal narrative.

painting after impressionism, matthew collings likes to say that it had nothing to do with the subject in the work, and everything to do with ways to explore how to make tonal bits interplay. subjective excuses for color dynamics. i think he had it wrong, the sentimentality of what makes a painter paint - it's always someway personal in stuff like this. but we will never know, and can only assimilate to color, and plausible narratives, or just to see it. here is a sight for eyes to wander ponder and leave. the lamp and shadow are where it's at. bla ...

Yeah she paints the lamp and its shadows nicely, but then you look at the turquoise bedcover and the whole thing goes CLUNK!

There was one I liked in this show, but it wasn’t Walker’s. It was called something like Girl overlooking the divide from the river. She looked rather ripped.

A bit Dana maybe.

I think it was either Vera or Angela. Which one did the Seattle housing tract? Was that Dufresne? Maybe I’m thinking of Vera. She kind of likes slamming down those big preliminary horizontal and vertical strokes I think – even on this itsy-bitsy scale they all seem to like.

The paint is juicy yes. But the lamp is way too quirky/cute for me with its sweet little crooked shade - and right in the middle of the painting asking to be read into though it looks like it belongs in a disney movie.

It's not even Christmas, but when you start trying to pull it apart using accomplished / unaccomplished you are already down the well, so to speak, the bucket just about to hit the brick. I mean painting isn't baton twirling is it ?

Someone made a great comment a couple of years ago about Maureen Gallace, suggesting that a sedate little landscape's reat cache is due to its having been in a hip Chelsea gallery. That it had an invisible film of value on it due to its placement.Cynical, perhaps, but I think there's something to it, because we currently have a great many painters who seem to be painting in a studied earnestl/awkward style. I am not saying this painter is a hipster/trickster who learned to push the righ irony buttons, but there does seem to be a certain claim of position as part of the content.

maureen gallace is anything but awkward. i thought of her when I saw this painting, and how much better she is than this. i feel MG's paintings speak for themselves (as well as being positioned). if the caroline's are positioned, then it's a position I'm not aware of